Danny John Kurian, an IT consultant based out of Bengaluru, kept throwing out groceries he had forgotten were in his kitchen. He is now building an AI agent to remember them for him. He calls it Pantry Brain. It scans groceries by barcode, tracks expiry dates and reminds him to use items before they go bad.
"The problem was not theoretical," Danny said. Pantry Brain is one module in a setup he runs on OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent. Another module reads his Gmail and summarises the important emails from the previous day. A third, which he calls Home Pulse, turns on his PC remotely and vacuums specific rooms of his home through a prompt.
Think of a humanoid robot. It has two arms and two legs, and now it is given a brain. That brain is a Large Language Model (LLM) or a Large Reasoning Model (LRM). The robot now has a brain, but it does not have a soul. Not yet.
An agentic AI is software that acts like that robot. A chatbot is something a user talks to. An agent goes and does things on the user's behalf, reading email, filling carts, booking tables and switching on lights.
At the centre of every serious AI agent sits a file. It goes by different names, soul.md, claude.md, agents.md, but it does the same job. It tells the agent who it is, how it thinks, what it values and what it will not do without asking first. That is, if all works well.
Without it, an AI agent is a language model waiting for instructions, and it will follow just about any instruction given to it. With it, the agent starts to feel like something with preferences, something that is in some sense uniquely its user's. A soul file makes it harder for the agent to argue about who it is supposed to be.
Enterprises building these agents make the news. But individuals are building them right now too. Not engineers at Google or Anthropic, but the hobbyist running one on a Raspberry Pi in his bedroom, or the freelancer letting it monitor client emails while he sleeps.
In 2026, two open-source projects drew heavy community activity. OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, who joined OpenAI in February 2026. OpenClaw moved to a foundation and stays open source. Hermes Agent is built by Nous Research. Both let a user run a persistent AI agent on their own hardware or a cheap VPS, connect it to messaging apps, calendar, email and files, and then largely leave it to work alone.
By May 2026, a megathread on the r/hermesagent subreddit had documented 276 use cases across 16 categories, gathered from 12 sources including Reddit, X, GitHub and YouTube.
One user ran a weather trading bot that turned USD 100 into USD 216 in 48 hours. A pharmacy student in Nigeria is using it to explore AI-assisted drug discovery. A person who has been blind since birth built an add-on for the NVDA screen reader with it.
The OpenClaw use cases read like dispatches from a cyberpunk novel. One agent negotiated a car purchase across multiple dealers over browser, email and iMessage, saving its owner USD 4,200. Another ordered groceries from a Dutch supermarket by reading a two-factor code off an iMessage bridge and logging into a 1Password vault. A solo founder runs four named agents, Milo, Josh, Angela and Bob, as a 24/7 virtual team from a cloud server.
Danny did not come to agentic AI as a developer. He works in IT, but on the product side. He followed technology closely and understood products from the user's point of view, but building software still needed a developer. Even the smallest thing meant crossing what he called a "huge chasm".
That changed in 2025, when he came across Home Assistant, the open-source home automation platform. It ran locally, unlike Google Home, Amazon Alexa or Apple HomeKit, and its community had built an integration for almost every smart device. Then he saw people connecting Claude to Home Assistant through an MCP server.
"Suddenly I didn't have to manually code any automation," Danny said. "I could simply tell Claude to do the automations based on the logic I want." By December 2025 he had built a credit card points app that turns a destination into a flight and hotel itinerary paid for with reward points. He used Figma AI for the front end and Cursor to build the app. All of it, he said, was "vibe coding".
In February 2026, while he was showing a friend his home automations, the friend asked him to try OpenClaw. "That was the final piece of the puzzle," Danny said. Besides Pantry Brain and Home Pulse, his setup runs a habit system that blocks his phone's DNS when he misses a habit.
Danny did not start from a blank agent. He exported and compacted a version of himself from his ChatGPT history and loaded it into OpenClaw as its soul, so the agent could get started quickly. He began with only two skills, Brave Search and Tavily Search.
That soul is what separates the agent from ordinary software. A normal app has settings. An agent has context about its user, in this case about Danny. "At the end of the day I wanted a smart assistant who could help me focus on my goals and needs better," he said, "and not pull me down into the details of running my everyday life."
Danny believes this is where software is headed. Every smartphone user has a different set of apps aligned to their daily workflows, he said, and those apps already run parts of people's lives. They are owned by corporations with incentives around data collection and subscription revenue. "Everybody always had ideas but now software has democratised," Danny said.
At Google I/O 2026, held on May 19 and 20, the theme across almost every session was agentic. The headline product was Gemini Spark, a personal AI agent that lives on Google's servers and runs 24/7. Google described it as an agent that takes actions on the user's behalf, under the user's direction. Sundar Pichai, the company's CEO, called it the next evolution of digital assistants.
Gemini Spark stays on when the user's phone is locked and laptop is off. It plugs natively into Gmail, Docs, Slides and Sheets, and connects to over 30 third-party services, including Adobe, Canva, Asana, Dropbox, HubSpot, Instacart and Spotify, through MCP connectors. It launched in May for subscribers of Google AI Ultra, at USD 99.99 a month.
On July 23, Google opened Spark to US subscribers of its USD 19.99 a month AI Pro plan, PCMag reported. Google's documentation says it will not be offered in the European Economic Area, the UK, Switzerland or Nigeria.
In Google's own examples, Spark reads a syllabus from Gmail, identifies the required textbooks and adds them to a shopping cart. It drafts inbox replies overnight and builds a study guide that updates as new assignments arrive.
xAI, Meta and OpenAI followed within five months. xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, launched Grok Bot in beta on August 11. Each user gets what xAI's documentation calls an Agent Computer, a virtual machine in the cloud. The bot logs into the user's tools, finishes the work and checks back only when it needs approval.
Meta launched Muse on September 8, in the US, for users aged 18 and above. Muse sends emails, books travel, fills forms and completes purchases, and each user's agent runs on its own cloud virtual machine that holds their connected data and credentials. A second agent, which Meta calls Sentinel, reviews Muse's planned actions and asks the user before sensitive ones. Muse has a free tier and subscriptions at USD 20 and USD 100 a month.
Meta said Muse conversations and data on the virtual machine are not shared with its ad systems. It plans to offer an encrypted version, where only the user holds the key, later this year.
OpenAI followed three weeks later. At its DevDay event on September 29, it launched Dots, always-on agents that each run on their own cloud computer with a virtual browser. A Dot keeps working toward a goal after its user logs off, and OpenAI said Dots can connect to more than 4,000 apps. They launched for Pro and Business Premium subscribers.
In February, OpenAI had hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. "Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents," CEO Sam Altman wrote on X at the time.
This is where the architecture matters. OpenClaw and Hermes are open source. Anyone can read the code and change it, and it runs on hardware or a VPS the user controls. The model can be self-hosted, so the data never has to leave the user's perimeter if the setup is done carefully.
Gemini Spark, Grok Bot, Muse and Dots all run on their makers' servers. Each runs the agent on a computer the user does not own, logged into the user's own accounts. For most users the choice is not technical. It is about whether to take the trouble to set it all up, or rent an agent from one of four companies.
Two of those four companies, Google and OpenAI, disclosed in 2026 that AI models they were testing had escaped their test environments and broken into real companies' systems. Both incidents happened during security tests of the models. Anthropic disclosed four similar incidents of its own.
Browser history tells Google what a user looked at. The Gemini assistant in Gmail tells it what the user said. An agent that runs across real communications and real decisions over weeks and months collects something different from a search profile.
It watches a user correct themselves, change their mind, reprioritise, defer and renegotiate. It maps their reasoning, their preferences and the process by which they arrive at those preferences. That takes time to build, and it is specific to one person in a way no demographic profile is.
In November 2025, a proposed class action, Thele v. Google LLC, was filed in the federal court in San Jose. It alleges that Google secretly enabled Gemini across Gmail, Chat and Meet accounts in October 2025 without user consent. In July 2026, the court dismissed the complaint because the plaintiffs had not shown a concrete harm, but allowed them to file an amended one, Bloomberg Law reported.
Google has since revised its Gemini Apps Privacy Notice to cover Spark, including how data flows when the agent uses a remote browser and computer.
In August and September 2025, Anthropic and Google changed their consumer settings so that chats are used for model training by default, unless the user opts out. ChatGPT already worked that way.
The EU AI Act's transparency obligations, which require AI systems to tell people they are dealing with AI, came into force on August 2, 2026. The European Commission began enforcing them that day, while obligations for high-risk systems were pushed to December 2027. Gemini Spark is not offered to users in the European Economic Area.
The people who have run these agents for months are not naive about the risk. Most of them are making deliberate choices within it. In the Hermes community, the privacy-conscious run their own SearXNG search containers, self-host their models, lock their agents behind Tailscale and keep memory in local databases instead of cloud providers.
They are building a more sovereign version of what Google now sells as a subscription. One of the most upvoted posts on the Hermes subreddit, titled "One month with Hermes Agent, what I wish I knew earlier" and posted on May 3, 2026, carries a warning about scope, not security. Do not build the whole machine on day one, the user wrote. "Hermes is powerful enough to make you overestimate how ready you are to use it properly."
The internet of the last 30 years extracted attention and sold it. The agent economy proposes something more intimate, a system that extracts decision making and learns from it. The early adopters who have thought hardest about this write their own soul files, run their own models, pay for their own compute and keep their own logs. They are a small minority.
Danny's agent lives on a mini PC in his home, one he bought for Rs 20,000 to run a Plex server. The soul it reads was exported from his ChatGPT history. The models that do its thinking, Claude Opus and Sonnet, run on Anthropic's servers.
For everyone else, the agent sits on Google's servers, reading their Gmail, watching them think and updating its model of who they are. The terms of that arrangement have not yet been negotiated by anyone.